Bought a wood-burning pen with some various tips and a booklet of silver leaf for under $20 at Hobby Lobby last Friday...but I couldn't get the stamping process to work out for me

I think either my pen gets too hot, or the silver leaf doesn't work the same as gold...becuase every time I touched the tip to the leaf, it would immediately burn straight through into the plastic and not leave any silver behind. Ted, you have any problems like that when you first started testing it out? I'm gonna pick up some gold leaf and try some more this week, maybe unplug the pen and let it cool for minute before using.

One cool thing that did work out with at least a little success was using a broad/flat tip to apply a plane of silver leaf, instead of just stippling/dots. I used 2 layers of leaf under 4 layers of alluminum foil - then moved the flat tip (about the size of a pencil eraser) lightly in small circles around a 1" square area...and almost the entire area came out solid silver! There were a few small spots where it didn't take, and the edges rubbed off a little...but I think it could improve with a little work. I never knew exactly what part would stick until I pulled the foil up, so I couldn't make any designs...maybe your resist technique woudl work with this method, but I think my pen would melt any hot glue on the disc

ps - first plastic I tested was DX, which didn't seem to work very well for me...the "planar" application method was tested on Millennium (1.16 Polaris LS to be specific)

I don't think this can be as hard as you guys are making it sound like.

1. The hot stamping foil should be the easiest part. eBay seems to be full of sellers and the prices are honestly low. I really think this will make a huge difference compared to gold/silver leaf. The two harder parts are making a die and applying the heat to it. 2. If I'm correct, steel is a good material to make a die out of along with magnesium, copper and brass. If you happen to know someone how has access to a CNC machine, I'd say it's first problem solved as he should be able to machine you a steel die. The other option would be to machine a steel stencil, which would allow it to be used reversely. Of course the costs for a die can be pretty high so it may not be worth it. Of course you can always try freehanding but it might not give you the same result.3. If you have a die, you could try applying heat to it with a flat iron. Right now I can't think of an alternate way of doing this but I'm sure at least some of you have better ideas. Alternately, if you have a stencil or you want to freehand your design you should be able to apply heat to the foil with a simple soldering iron or such and go through the whole design with it.

Maybe I'm being a little optimistic here, maybe not. But I honestly don't think that it's impossible to make decent looking designs on your own. I'm sorry to say that at the moment I've got no time to try this out by myself but I hope someone is going to prove me right in the very near future.

Disclaimer: I have no experience on any of this, I'm just throwing ideas here. And in no way am I trying to criticize any of your efforts so far so please don't take this the wrong way.

Fullbag wrote:Maybe I'm being a little optimistic here, maybe not. But I honestly don't think that it's impossible to make decent looking designs on your own. I'm sorry to say that at the moment I've got no time to try this out by myself but I hope someone is going to prove me right in the very near future.

Yes, I was too optimistic and no, it's not that easy. I bought a wood burner and some cheap nail foil and did my own testing. Here's what I got:

hurry up with it already. I want to see some more attempts at this. I've always wanted a disc that has almost the entire top of it w/ refractor hot stamp. I'm sure it would look badass in flight on a sunny day.